Thursday, June 7, 2012

My flight is delayed and a good opportunity to continue my
blog. The latest organizational changes kept me a little occupied and I got
badly delayed with my writings – deepest apologies to my followers. Anyway, in
this post I will summarize my experiment as a Scrum Master and I will also
share some findings and observations.

Three months sounds a long time, and on the other hand it
went by in a blink of an eye. Based on the feedback I received I was able to
make a difference, people saw what a different mindset can do, they got ideas
on how to view issues. On the other hand, there have been doubts whether the
three-months dose of me was enough to sustain the new spirit and level of
energy. Time will tell.

During my time, I have experienced all sorts of feelings:
frustration, anger, loneliness,“all
world is on my shoulders” as well as joy, reward by being able to influence
others, fun, achievement, good feeling one gets when helping others and when
one sees that something is changing to a better direction.

When discussing with management about lean and agile, I hear
often that people in R&D are perceived lazy and the manager must push them
that something gets done. I wonder where those lazy people are – I met only
people which wanted to do a good job, get better at what they do, become a true
professional, wanted to learn and last but not least – they would like to have
fun at work. Yes, they typically have their own ideas and ways in how to do
that. So if a manager thinks this is the way to do this task, I can ensure you
that “my way is certainly not the other person’s way” – so much for harmonizing
this & that. Keep this in mind and let the people “freely” doing their
work.

I was overwhelmed by my findings – so many and of so
different kinds. The first one which I found regularly was denial. I got the
imagine of the three monkeys in head – don’t see, hear, speak. This brings me
back one of my previous posts. Assuming an outside consulting would say “I
think, you have a problem” – I got in almost all cases the answer – no I/we
don’t. Besides, this confronting consulting style (I mean it really hurt me to
see those issues), the denial went basically on all the time. Yes – BUT. Yes,
we are drowning in bug reports but it is not sooo bad as it looks. I am ok to
hear this once, maybe twice – when I see it most of the time, it’s start to
smell. The question is – how to break the denial state at different levels in
the organization?

Old habits die hard – I could surely confirm that. One of
the biggest challenge in the organization seems to be to unlearn old practices,
ways of working which are not supporting the business goals, not supporting a
lean and agile way of working. Since typically new improvement things (e.g.
learning TDD) was typically put ontop of the existing workload, it was done on
a best-effort base. And the fact that people have several roles and try to
joggle between those roles did not make the situation any easier. A suggestion
would be to consequently and regularly check whether e.g. certain meetings are
still needed and if not, remove them consequently and free time for those new
study items.

I think I did the biggest impact in changing people’s
perception to how they feel about their abilities to influence. Many people felt
“down”, they were afraid – they were “victims” – figuratively some persons felt
like somebody puts a pistol on their head or holds them down, low on the bottom.
I met several persons with a personal conflict. On the one hand they want to
get better and then once more I hear “ Yes, but I/we cannot” … victims of the circumstances. I think that
some individuals truly understood what a different viewpoint can do and they changed
their attitude by e.g. identifying what they CAN do instead of listing what
they cannot do.

The breakthrough finding I had was the following. A typical
team had three types of input work (1) New feature development, (2) Bug
corrections and (3) Improvement actions.

New features came in via the Product Backlog. The features
prioritization was done at several levels, in several rounds by many
stakeholders and in the end, they agreed on which feature is more important.
These inputs were given to the Product Owner. As the organization was running
several parallel releases, the (Product) Area Product Owner needed to joggle a
little more and prioritize between those inputs (You certainly noticed the
inconsistency here, however that is not the major finding). The APO and team
agreed in sprint planning what is done next (as described in Scrum).

The fault correction input stream represented the second
kind of input. One reason why this was so important was the fact that the
Product Verification was a separate organization and the development and
verification folks communicated by using a fault management tool. Not very scrumish
- is it? Anyway, I admired the pretty cool way they tried to manage the
prioritization between new feature development and fault corrections (or
getting the stuff DONE) by using a two-level threshold system which guides the
teams whether they should work on new features or fix old stuff. On a side
note, it did not really work, and I did not have a chance to dig deeper into
this.

The third kind of input was improvements and – boy hey –
there were many J …
Typically all the managers had ideas on how the teams can improve, the SM had
ideas and suggestions, the team members had ideas and so on and so on. I would
claim that those improvement items were not prioritized properly. They were a
big number of things to improve and I got the feeling that many things were
started and nothing really pulled throughout the entire organization. Some of
the improvement ideas made it to the incentive system, others were hosted in
some other cross-organizational level plans and team items were occasionally
visible in impediment/improvement backlogs.

Now - The BIG findings was that I was not able to find any
sort of priorities between those three types!

And this means, that the decision whether new feature shall
be developed, a fault should be corrected or an improvement item shall be done
next was very much up to the individual team member. On the other hand, my
impression was that due to lack of relevant business information e.g. value of
feature vs. fault correction vs. improvement item – the decision became a
rather intuitive one. This way of making decision seemed to lead again to more
frustration and giving the people the feeling they try to “survive” instead of
thriving and flourishing.

This experiment has been a huge learning for me, I had
plenty of fun and I got wiser. I do not regret conducting this experiment and I
can only recommend to coaches to do this for the sake of getting the experience
(I think also the counterpart can learn, however this is up to them not to
you).On a personal note, I realized,
that being a Scrum Master is not for me. I enjoy much more to work with several
teams, across the organization, to have time to study when working remotely. I
think this is not compatible to my role definition of a Scrum Master.

There are still one or two items I wanted to document from
this experiment. Stay tuned for those. I hope you enjoyed the blog and maybe
could use some of the items I listed here, thoughts I wrote down.

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me

Motto: Change is Welcome!
Vision: "If you see change not as an enemy, but as a welcome friend, you will secure the most valuable prize of all
- The Future!"
Goal: Find ways to improve product development and have more fun at work.
My work: I worked 8+years as a project/program manager, 7 years as a development manager in program management and since 2008 I am a Lean and Agile coach.
Founder & Explorer in Wolfoy